Ailes to Fox News pundits: ‘Tone it down’

He lays down covering fire worthy of a Marine rear guard unit, but Fox News boss Roger Ailes says in an interview that Fox’s pungent pundits have been told to put reason over rhetoric.

“I told all of our guys, shut up, tone it down, make your argument intellectually: You don’t have to do it with bombast. I hope the other side does that,” Ailes said in an interview with Russell Simmons of GlobalGrind.com

Ailes’ remarks, prompted by the shootings in Arizona, were coupled with a strong defense of Sarah Palin, a possible Republican presidential candidate who works as a commentator for Fox News.

The former Alaska governor has been attacked for a map of politically targeted districts marked by cross hairs. The district of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, D-Ariz., was on the target list.

“We looked at the Internet and the first thing we found in 2007, the Democrat Party had a targeted map with targets on it for the Palin district,” said Ailes. “These maps have been used for for years that I know of.”

“I have two pictures of myself with a bull’s-eye on my head. This is just bull(bleep). This goes on . . . both sides are wrong, but they both do it.”

(The “Palin district” reference is confusing. Palin has never run for Congress. She was elected governor of Alaska in 2006 and was the Republican vice presidential nominee in 2008.)

One prominent Fox News pundit, Glenn Beck, has decorated his web site with the words: “We must stand together against all violence.”

But other voices of the right are responding with defensive fury to those who have argued that there is a connection between the Arizona killings – and the wounding of Giffords – and the nation’s acrimonious political debate.

On Monday, longtime conservative radio voice Rush Limbaugh accused critics of pursuing an agenda of “shutting down conservative media, shutting down all political opposition.”

Limbaugh recalled similar verbal fire directed at the right after anti-government extremists bombed the Oklahoma City federal building in 1995, killing 168 people.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if somebody in the Obama regime, some FCC bureaucrat . . . has already written up legislation to stifle conservative speech,” Limbaugh added. “Every time an event like this happens, they get into a trial run in hopes they succeed in shutting us down.

“They can’t beat us, we still have the Constitution. They can’t beat us, so they’ll do anything they can to shut us down.”

Michelle Malkin, a columnist who contributes to Fox News, also took after “the Left” in the wake of the Saturday shootings.

“The Tucson massacre ghouls who are now trying to criminalize conservatism have forced our hand,” Malkin declared. “They need to be reminded, you need to be reminded. Confront them. Don’t be cowed into silence.”

“And don’t let the media whitewash the sins of the hypocritical Left in their naked attempt to suppress the law-abiding, constitutionally protected, peaceful, vigorous political speech of the right.”

Chris Horner, writing in the American Spectator, also referenced the specter of Oklahoma City:

“Sure enough, it was in the early 1995 aftermath of the Dems’ 1994 electoral shellacking – mere days after President Bill Clinton felt compelled to insist that he was still relevant – that the establishment media and others in the professional Left seized upon the loon’s violence de jour, Oklahoma City, to claim it was the product of hateful anti-government rhetoric in the airwaves.”

Former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, a prospective 2012 Republican presidential candidate did have critical words for Palin and her cross hairs map.